known my brother. Her name was Olivia Collins. I wondered if you could just do a search and see what became of her.”
* * *
—
When he sees Freeman again, two weeks later, he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. “I have some bad news,” she tells him when she sits down. “That woman you asked me to look up, Olivia Collins. She died last month.”
“Oh,” he says. But he already knew this, he realizes. He’s seen Olivia twice now, once in the commissary and once in the yard, where she was engaged in conversation with Yvette Bertolli.
“I’m sorry,” Freeman says, and launches into her questions.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks a little later, interrupting a line of tedious questioning about account statements.
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you want to write about all this?”
“I’ve always had an interest in mass delusion,” she says. “My senior thesis was about a cult in Texas.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme.”
“I’ve always maintained that,” Alkaitis says.
“So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”
“People believe in all kinds of things,” he said. “Just because it’s a delusion doesn’t mean it can’t make real money for people. You want to talk about mass delusions, I know a lot of guys who got rich off of subprime mortgages.”
“Is it fair to call you the embodiment of the era, do you think?”
“That seems a little harsh, Julie. I didn’t cause a global economic meltdown. I was as much a victim of the economic collapse as anyone. By the time Lehman Brothers folded, I knew I couldn’t keep it going much longer.”
“I’d like to ask you about Ella Kaspersky,” Freeman says.
“Not my favorite person in the world.”
“Do you remember your first meeting with her?”
He met Kaspersky in 1999, at the Hotel Caiette. The trip was ill-starred from the beginning. Suzanne was sick by then and had stayed home in New York, and by the time he arrived at the hotel he was already regretting going out there and thinking about cutting the trip short. But he needed investors, so he’d been spending a week of every month away from New York City, trawling club drawing rooms and hotel bars. He liked the Hotel Caiette in particular, because the fact that he owned the property lent instant credibility: Look, here we are having a conversation under a roof that I own. Not that he played any role whatsoever in the management of the place, but that wasn’t important.
On that visit to the Hotel Caiette he came downstairs on his second evening and there was Ella Kaspersky, an elegant woman in early middle age, drinking whiskey in an armchair and gazing out at the twilight luminescence of the inlet, the reflection of the lobby rising to the surface of the glass. Alkaitis positioned himself nearby, nodded when she glanced at him. What did they talk about? Italy, if he remembers correctly. She was an art collector. She didn’t work. She traveled, she studied languages, she went to auctions and art fairs. She’d just spent three months studying Italian in Rome, and so they went off together on an extended tangent about the pleasures of Italy before the conversation turned to what he did for a living. She was interested. It emerged quite naturally that she had money to invest; her father, who’d died only a few months earlier, had bequeathed most of his fortune to their family’s charitable foundation, and Ella was involved in the foundation’s investment decisions.
“Tell me about your investment strategy,” she said.
He went into it in some detail. He told her he was using the split-strike conversion strategy, which involved buying a collection of stocks along with option contracts to sell those stocks at a set price later, thus minimizing risk. He timed these purchases according to fluctuations in the market, he told her, sometimes pulling out of the market altogether to invest his clients’ money in government-backed securities, U.S. Treasury bills and such, reentering the market when the time seemed right. She gave the impression of listening intently, but she was at least three drinks in by then and he wouldn’t have guessed that